What is the evidence that mandates are not effective? I’m in oz and nobody can turn up to work at an aged care home without up to date vaccines including flu, and now nobody can step on for work who’s not vaccinated. I cannot go into my office building until I’ve had my second dose. It seems perfectly effective, in ensuring safe environments for vulnerable people, and also in tipping people who weren’t sure over the line to get vaccinated, which has the benefits of flow on transmission reduction as well as less severe incidences, both of which reduce the pressure on hospitals.
What's going on in Australia is a really good example of the dangers in these kinds of mandates.
One of the things I always notice in this is that many people now, especially young ones, seem to have very little awareness of what kinds of balancing are required in public mandates about things like receiving vaccinations or other medical treatments. Whether it's mandated directly or forced by government legislation that says you lose your job, even if you work alone in the woods or on a farm, if you don't do what they want.
There is a very high bar for this kind of thing and in in most countries like the UK, Oz, Canada, the US, has only been possible because of emergency measures mandates. It's notable that Australia is now looking to push through legislation that will give the health minister unprecedented powers to make health orders even when not under a state of emergency.
That is where this stuff is headed. Justifying very authoritarian actions by the state that violate what have been legal principles about things like medical decision making, justified for "the public good".
But as far as this vaccine in particular. People hoped that it would be much more effective in preventing transmission, and therefor by having large numbers of people vaccinated it would really just make the virus rare. This allowed people, in their minds anyway, to justify the idea that the state should use strong measures to force people into getting the vaccine, even though it's such a new drug (new drugs tend to be the ones that will have some unexpected effects which is why many doctors avoid prescribing them until they have been around for a bit, if they can.)
Except that it doesn't. There are a fair number of breakthrough cases and while it reduces transmission, there can still be quite a lot. It also makes it more likely there will be asymptomatic transmission. Diseases that respond best to vaccination are things like smallpox - still the only human disease ever extinguished. They need to have a vaccine that is pretty much completely effective, a very short incubation period, slow rate of mutation, and very obvious symptoms. That is the opposite of covid and similar viruses.
So changes are they it will be with us permanently, unless you want to go total isolationist.
So mandates for vaccination should be weighed against a scenario where you still have covid around, maybe a fair bit. It's not at all clear that the difference between most people choosing to vaccinate in this scenario, and the authoritarian measures required to get everyone vaccinated, will have much effect overall, especially as it also tends to affect people's attitudes negatively.